AppFog owners join Cloud Foundry party

CenturyLink-owned Saavis follow IBM to newly-formed advisory board for Pivotals PaaS, with more on the way.

Two
weeks after it was announced that
IBM would join a newly-formed Cloud Foundry advisory board, it
has its second member: CenturyLink-owned Saavis.

An open-source PaaS developed by VMware, Cloud Foundry was
recently moved to Pivotal, a new venture jointly owned by VMware
and EMC. In the wake of its move to the spinoff, it appears the
project’s owners are hoping to get additional partners on
board.

The key to this latest partnership is AppFog, the PaaS providers
purchased by CenturyLink and added to its Saavis subdivision in
June. AppFog’s platform has been based on Cloud Foundry
from the very beginning, and they will be providing the
majority of interaction of this deal.

As with IBM, developers from AppFog will be working
“shoulder-to-shoulder” with Pivotal’s engineering team on the Cloud
Foundry codebase via the “Cloud Foundry Dojo”. Saavis will also
become a platinum sponsor of the Clound Foundry-centric Platform conference in
September.

So how do these companies benefit from these deals, considering
that Cloud Foundry is open source anyway? For a start, it serves to
counter worries over the company’s dominance over the project; the
more companies on board, the more trustworthy it becomes to
outsiders wary of lock-in. Meanwhile, by entering a formal
partnership, the advisory board members gain increased control over
a project that is – at least in the case of AppFog – essential to
their business.

Expect additional members to join over the coming months. Asian
tech giants Baidu and Rakuten are tentatively on board – at least,
according to Lucas Carlson, VP of cloud evangelism for
CenturyLink.

However, even with such large names now backing Cloud Foundry,
the battle for the top of the PaaS pile is far from over. And the
project isn’t even the only major open source option: Red Hat’s
OpenShift is being pushed equally as hard.

The entire market also faces an uphill struggle to convince the
enterprise market to adopt – private PaaSes in particular have
seen a slow uptake. Still, with the might of General
Engineering, VMware, EMC, IBM and now CenturyLink behind it, Cloud
Foundry may just make it.